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Trump Says He’ll Immediately Deport Or Imprison Up To 3 Million Undocumented Immigrants

adminJanuary 22, 2018January 22, 2018Comments Off on Trump Says He’ll Immediately Deport Or Imprison Up To 3 Million Undocumented Immigrants

President-elect Donald Trump made a plan to deport or imprison about 2 million and 3 million undocumented immigrants as soon as he takes office.

In an interview with CBS News that will air Sunday night, Trump said he would launch what could be the largest mass deportation effort in modern history, promising to instantly deport a number of people comparable to the record-setting figure that President Barack Obama executed over two terms in office.

“What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, where a lot of these people, probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate,” Trump said in the interview. “But we’re getting them out of our country, they’re here illegally.”

In saying that 2 million to 3 million undocumented immigrants with criminal records live in the U.S., Trump was repeating a claim he’d made earlier in the campaign that The Washington Post fact-checked and determined was inaccurate.

The Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, estimates that around 820,000 undocumented immigrants have criminal records ― a figure that includes many people whose only conviction is crossing the border illegally. Under prosecutorial discretion guidelines in place since 2011, undocumented migrants with minor crimes are in some cases able to avoid deportation

After his initial round of deportations and efforts at border security, Trump said, his administration would assess its policy on the remaining undocumented immigrants residing here.

“After the border is secure and after everything gets normalized, we’re going to make a determination on the people that they’re talking about who are terrific people, they’re terrific people but we are gonna make a determination at that,” Trump said. “But before we make that determination … it’s very important, we are going to secure our border.”

Apprehensions of people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally have dropped to less than a quarter of what they were during their peak of 1.8 million in the year 2000.

Trump’s comments appeared to contradict RNC Chairman Reince Priebus’ claims last week that Trump would not call for mass deportation, despite the president-elect’s hard-line immigration stand since the day he launched his campaign referring to Mexican migrants in broad strokes as “rapists.”

“He’s not calling for mass deportation,” Priebus said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” last week. “He said, ‘No, only people who have committed crimes.’ And then only until all of that is taken care of will we look at what we are going to do next.”